Observations on Sharepoint by Brian Drake

Please see:

http://briandrake.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-sharepoint/

I fully agree with most all of Brian's comments, but would like to offer some additional thoughts.

I believe Brian sees the fact that Sharepoint users can create whatever group memberships they feel is necessary for security as one of most the significant issues impeding enterprise collaboration. Though this is certainly an important consideration, I'm not sure I see this Sharepoint feature as the core challenge to organizations who have chosen to deploy wiki software.

TWiki also supports the ability to restrict access to content as needed. The flexibility to control access to information at some level is required within all enterprise organizations. Many of our customers insist on LDAP or AD integration in their deployments. What we observe in these cases, is that although the IT departments are proficient in managing user access to systems and sometimes even managing group membership at the department level, they can't begin to manage 'knowledge groups" at all. They are simply too dynamic. So that control has to come from somewhere outside of IT. In TWiki's case, TWiki access controls can overlay LDAP, and also restrict read-write access to information w/o LDAP.

A much bigger collaboration issue confronting many organizations today is related not so much to the question of: 'Does one tool make it too easy to lock down information?', but more of: 'How best to address the informational bias of many individuals and over arching corporate culture that keeps companies from realizing the true potential of a knowledge sharing organization?". Many organizations we've seen have created greater barriers to collaboration because historically no one wiki was a good fit for all user types and the decision to buy or download free open source was typically made too low in the organization. Many of these departmental wiki silos have been created simply because early wikis didn't have the nice WYSIWYG editors they do today and required the use a of a markup language that was different depending upon the wiki selected. Today there are converters that can be used to consolidate these silos. Relative the the cultural issues doing the consolidation work is a straight forward technical matter.

The fact that Lewis Shepherd, the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments took the time to comment on Brian's points is noteworthy. That MSFT had to spend a $1.2B to acquire FAST's search technology indicates how critical search is to delivering efficient enterprise collaboration solutions.

The latest version of Certified TWiki includes the Plucene search engine to quickly within Office based attachments. Because it's indexed search, its very, very fast. It was natural to include Plucene in Certified TWiki because its open source. (THANK YOU! to the Plucene open source development team).

One observation we have of organizations with a deep understanding of wiki based collaboration and its impact on organizational knowledge, is that the amount of content residing in MS Office documents decreases dramatically- by more than 70%... So then the question really is; If Sharepoint's main value is searching and storing office based information in a way that's somewhat better than placing documents in NT file system and finding them with desktop search, how valuable is it when most content is created directly within the Wiki?

Some organizations in the midst of making the transition to true wiki based collaboration models have deployed interesting hybrids; They use Sharepoint, for the filestore but prefer TWiki for the wiki/web 2.0 collaboration engine front end. And in at least one case, because they had already deployed the Google search appliance within the enterprise, chose to integrate their existing search engine appliance with TWiki as the Mashup point.

David Pointzer Sr. Process Engineering Manager, R&D of Mars Inc. states it well. (They also have Sharepoint) "It is my experience that a true competitive advantage comes from not just getting the wiki tool that everyone can get and use. No advantage there, just keeping up. An advantage can be built by taking a look at how these tools can be customized and supercharged to facilitate your particular ways of working, culture, business, etc. This is where the TWiki solution is strongest."

If you want to discover how many wikis silos you have within your organization, consider giving our WikiCrawler a spin. You might find the results surprising.

Cheers,

Will

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2009-05-08 | Will Thomas | Category Best Practices